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Simcity Freezing. Help Please. =(

Hi. I have Sim City 4 Deluxe Edition. I loaded it onto my computer and it ran fine the first time I loaded it, but after closing it and then reopening it later that day, it freezes on the bridge loading screen. Sometimes it flat out crashes and some times it just freezes, but my task manager says it is running. I tried rebooting my computer and it worked fine again. However, I closed it after I was done playing and then it wouldn't reload again. It seems like it will load once after I reboot, but after that I get an error. Wierd.

I tried going to the EA customer service sit and they had me update my drivers, reinstall, etc. Nothing worked. Anyone have a similar problem and can offer some help. I could post system specs if that will help.

This sounds like a driver or operating system issue. The reason you can not reopen SimCity after closing it is because it is not unloading correctly. I would recommend making sure you have done a complete windows update via Microsoft's Windows Update site.

You may have scoured the web, but did you run Windows Update? This might not be your problem, but this needs to be eliminated before any other guessing can take place. A program not unloading correctly is oftentimes a sign of a driver issue. What version of Windows does your computer run, what kind of computer do you have and how old is it? Have you checked your computer for spyware, virues, etc.?

Fair enough. I did a Windows update including the optional stuff and the problem is still occuring. Ran norton, adaware, and spybot. No viruses, but cleared a few bits of spyware. Still not working. :confused:

I'll assume that you installed any updates you found for SimCity and I'll assume that you uninstalled and reinstalled SimCity. Something isn't playing nice on your computer. The only way to find out what is not playing nice is to look at what is running resident in memory. What programs are running on start up? You might try disabling Norton to see if it is causing problems. Software like Norton that put deep hooks into the OS can cause problems. You might also see if changing your desk top resolution has any impact on things.

I disabled Norton, but that didn't help. I loaded a couple of pics of the stuff running in my task manager: the first is before opening sc, the next two are while it is open (i couldn't get them all in one shot), and the last is after it closes. Nothing really seems to change. :confused: :mad:

The quality of the screen captures was too low for me to read what was running (maybe try saving them as GIFs); however, it seems to me that there are way too many things running resident in memory.

If you run "msconfig" from Start ==> Run, you can look at what is running at start up and temporarily disable some things until you find what it is that is causing problems. I personally do not allow things like quicktime load at start up. The fewer non-essential programs you allow to load as startup the better.

About 8-9 of the processes are for my TV tuner program, but I still tried to close it all down, along with some other stuff like QT. Here are pics again (before I closed everything down), so hopefully you can see them this time. I can also post my "dxdiag" log if you want to.

I couldn't find any specific red flags; however, there was a lot of extranious utilties running like iTunes, AIM, Folding@Home, etc. Some of these programs are trying to do things in the background even when you are not directly using them. Video games like SimCity tend not to play nicely with other programs and they do not like sharing with other programs. You should really go through and see if you can find ways to get non-essential programs to stop loading at start up. Things like Quicktime do not need to load at startup in order to run properly when you want them. In honesty, you have a lot more processes loading at start up than my computer does.

I don't know if cleaning up your startup programs will allow SimCity to run properly, but it should improve the performance of your computer.

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